Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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of the square—would be illegitimate. Art history has accordingly excluded Haacke’s Condensa-
tion Cube, for example, from any affiliation with Minimal Art. Yet all of these artists define
artistic production and reception by the mid-1960s as reaching beyond the traditional thresholds
of visuality (both in terms of the materials and production procedures of the studio and
those of industrial production), and it is on the basis of this parallel that their work can be
understood to be linked beyond a mere structural or morphological analogy. The protoconceptual
works of the mid-1960s redefine aesthetic experience, indeed, as a multiplicity of
nonspecialized modes of object- and language-experience. According to the reading these objects
generate, aesthetic experience—as an individual and social investment of objects with
meaning—is constituted by linguistic as well as by specular conventions, by the institutional
determination of the object’s status as much as by the reading competence of the spectator.
Within this shared conception, what goes on to distinguish these objects from each other
is the emphasis each one places on different aspects of that deconstruction of the traditional
concepts of visuality. Morris’s Mirrored Cubes, for example (once again in an almost literal execution
of a proposal found in Duchamp’s Green Box), situate the spectator in the suture of the mirror
reflection: that interface between sculptural object and architectural container where neither element
can acquire a position of priority or dominance in the triad between spectator, sculptural
object, and architectural space. And insofar as the work acts simultaneously to inscribe a phenomenological
model of experience into a traditional model of purely visual specularity and to
displace it, its primary focus remains the sculptural object and its visual apperception.
By contrast, Haacke’s Condensation Cube—while clearly suffering from a now even more
rigorously enforced scientistic reductivism and the legacy of modernism’s empirical positivism—moves
away from a specular relationship to the object altogether, establishing instead a
bio-physical system as a link between viewer, sculptural object, and architectural container. If
Morris shifts the viewer from a mode of contemplative specularity into a phenomenological
loop of bodily movement and perceptual reflection, Haacke replaces the once revolutionary
concept of an activating “tactility” in the viewing experience by a move to bracket the phenomenological
within the determinacy of “system.” For his work now suspends Morris’s tactile
“viewing” within a science-based syntagm (in this particular case that of the process of condensation
and evaporation inside the cube brought about by temperature changes due to the frequency
of spectators in the gallery).
And finally, we should consider what is possibly the last credible transformation of the
square, at the height of Conceptual Art in 1968, in two works by Lawrence Weiner, respectively
entitled A Square Removal from a Rug in Use and A36��36 � Removal to the Lathing or Support